Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours

http://edweissman.com/dear-boss-for-a-programmer-10-minutes-3-hours

by joshuacc • 14 years ago

699 157 14 years ago

edweissman.com

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

This is so true. The sad part though is that during the 3 hrs Ed was stuck reading HN not doing something productive.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

> reading HN not doing something productive

Hey now, what are you trying to imply? :)

bitops3• 14 years ago

Ed could have shortened the time by helping. Really poor team attitude.

lawnchair_larry• 14 years ago

Helping how? Telling her boss to share control? Telling her where to click? There was absolutely nothing Ed could have done, and it's the expectation that he can fix every little thing that is the root of these problems.

ww520• 14 years ago

This is what happens when there's no tech support people to interface with the users and translate the problem into engineering tickets. You either train the business users to be able to articulate the problem clearly and document the reproduction steps in the ticket, or the boss should have served as the interface to the business users to do the translation. Otherwise the engineers will be doing all the supports. As corporations continue to downsize, the remaining ones will take on more and more responsibility.

a3camero• 14 years ago

"I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

bingo_cannon• 14 years ago

3 hours and late lunch!

davux2• 14 years ago

We all know that context switching is bad, and it's tough to switch so much, but did Ed really have nothing else to do? He seems bothered by what the boss was asking him, yet he blows most of the 3hrs not working on what he said he needed to work on originally? That just doesn't add up to me.

I get the point, and it's definitely true, but I spend those idle minutes doing mail and other short tasks. I don't see how one can justify "well I'm waiting for you so I'll just not work for a while."

Is this common outside of the computing industry? What do other people do in their 'in between' time?

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

A lot of times, there isn't anything you can work on that doesn't require a lot of concentration. I got an interrupt earlier today that put me on hold for an hour, while an email chain tried to sort out what was necessary.

How can I focus on implementing a hard feature when at any point, someone might pull me away from it and knock down my house of cards?

Hell, even if I'm writing code and suddenly I have to actually start working on a different project, I have to commit what I was doing, and try to squash everything later, or start stashing code around, and set up the other project's environment, etc. That's five minutes eaten up already.

randomdata• 14 years ago

I find learning something new doesn't require a lot of context switching, and while does not show immediate productivity, the long term gains to the organization are present and quite valuable. It beats just randomly surfing the internet anyway; bean counters may not agree.

fleitz• 14 years ago

Ed allocated his time according to his bosses request. During the entire time he was dedicated to making progress on his action item. If his company allocates time so poorly it is not Ed's fault. His boss clearly deprioritized his other tasks probably because he poorly estimated the time required by close to 2 orders of magnitude.

div• 14 years ago

I can't imagine doing any useful work in the scenario being described.

If I'm being strung along like that, knowing that my attention could be required at any minute, it is extremely hard to load a chunk of code in my head because any spare brain-cycles are reflexively spent trying to figure out if my input is required yet.

This is very much like trying to read when you're tired. You'll read 5 pages and then all of a sudden realize you don't even know what you read in the previous paragraph.

Sure you can triage your mail and small tasks and quickly do the stuff that takes 3 or 4 minutes, but I find that I often have just a few of those tasks. Certainly not enough to fill 3 hours worth of time.

Shengster3• 14 years ago

Great response. It's hard to get any real work done when you have to constantly context switch between different things. Ed didn't know that he'd have to waste 3 hours of his time. It was only supposed to take 10 minutes after all.

greenyoda• 14 years ago

And if you do happen to try writing some code amid the constant interruptions, you stand a good chance of introducing some stupid error that could take hours to debug later. Best not to even try to code under such conditions.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

I'll add that, after enough time, one can start to do this as a self-defense mechanism. Trying to switch back and forth -- and remember to keep switching back and forth -- becomes exhausting. And after this has happened to you enough in the first few years of your career, you can also start to get pretty pissed off. Deliberately "opting out" of the counter-productive switching, and/or of dwelling on its context, can be a way of retaining your sanity. Just document your time and how it was consumed, so that you can't be accused of being the cause of missing targets.

P.S. I'll add that if the boss had taken Ed's suggestion, all of this could have happened asynchronously in email or the ticket system. Especially if the user has been given a copy of SnagIt or similar screen capture software on their system (along with strong admonition to never "snag" confidential data) and been shown how to use it.

Screenshots (or these days I suppose, video) go into the ticket. Ed can see it's "really happening". Ed confirms and follows up with Fred. Fred responds the next time he reviews emails or tickets. Ed follows up with the boss.

    Time for Sue:  ~30 minutes
    Time for boss:  ~15 minutes
    Time for Ed:  ~15 minutes
    Time for Fred:  ~15 minutes

If Fred reviews at least once a day, boss would have his answer latest by mid-day of the following day. As compared to mid-afternoon of the same day while burning a lot of expensive time/resources.

enjo• 14 years ago

I for one find it really difficult to context switch like that. I'd likely idly attempt to work on whatever I was doing to begin with, but it would be frustrating and not very rewarding:)

bmj• 14 years ago

But, this should not have taken three hours. Seems like most of that time was spent waiting for unexpected[1] blocks. Why context-switch if it is possible that you'll need to do again in two minutes?

[1] Of course, when does web conferencing software work straighaway (whether it's a problem with the software or somewhere between the keyboard and the chair).

pnathan• 14 years ago

When I am on the hook like that, I think about existing problems at a high level, scribble some docs, or read some educational material.

davux2• 14 years ago

This is what I'm getting at. I don't believe most people are so laser-focused on a single one task that they have nothing else to do but read HN. If you have one and only one thing to do, you still might as well attempt to complete some facet of it. If you really can't find things to fill your time, perhaps you have a different problem. I don't see how reading HN is less frustrating than reading documents. It sure makes a nice excuse, but it's nothing more than an excuse to waste time.

Maybe I don't get it since I have a BigCorp job, but I've always got tons of little things I can do, if/when I want to. That sure seems like significantly better use of the companies time. Making the argument that "well this shouldn't happen!" is hardly solving any problem.

Interruptions are a fact of life, embrace them when they can't be avoided.

j45• 14 years ago

Ed, the funny thing is I have customers that end up paying to do this.

I give them an answer and then they take 3 hours going in circles to arrive back at my first email. I am slowly coming to see it as them paying for time towards their education when they decide to insist understanding the inner workings of something better than someone who has built it.

Despite my best to bring it to their attention to send me the information complete and once to get the quickest resolution, folks feel productive when going back and forth.

I squarely blame this on the Blackberry exec mindset. Talking all day by email or IM or phone doesn't mean you get anything done.

If you point it out, they won't like finding out they're the cause of slowing everything down, because they're so important.

0.02

yxhuvud• 14 years ago

Indeed.

It is often more effective to ask the right questions so that the other part can arrive at the correct conclusion by themselves instead of telling them the conclusion from the start.

nlawalker• 14 years ago

Heh, I love the detail on all the confcall/web sharing problems.

Every conf call I join includes at least two of the following.

- The leader who is in the conf room calls in from the table phone and from their PC and can't figure out how to stop the screaming feedback. What's funny about this one to me is that the same people do it every time.

- Tom calls from his car. He must be on the interstate, judging from the road gradient we can hear.

- Dick joins from his laptop, where the microphone is conveniently part of the same physical device as the keyboard. CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK.

- Harry is working from home. We become intimately familiar with his three-year-old daughter's escapades with Cheerios and love of Phineas & Ferb.

- Judging from the number of sirens, Jake apparently lives in a bad part of town or is watching Blues Brothers in the background.

- Lucy has apparently joined while sitting in a conference room, attending another meeting simultaneously.

- Robert joins 15 minutes late and would like everything he missed to be recapped.

- Mark absolutely will not let the meeting progress unless someone is recording. Everyone spends 10 minutes figuring out how to do this. No one can find the file at the end of the meeting.

- James calls in via a VOIP connection from India, introducing a slight delay. "Hello?" "Hellohello" "Hi James, can-" "Hello" "Hi James, we are-" "Hello, hi yes-" "Hi James-"

- Dave joins from the airport. According to the PA, someone named Janice needs to report to the ticket desk.

- Mike has apparently set his cell phone ringer volume to "over 9000" and has placed it next to his mic.

- "Can you see my screen?" "No". "How about now?" -cue pictures of cats- "Yes but I think you have shared the wrong monitor." "How about now?" -cue spreadsheet- "Yes." -cue scrolling that the video broadcast can't keep up with- "Now if you can see here, here and here..."

Mass meetings are the funniest. During one surreal leadership presentation where hundreds of people joined via a web meeting and many more were present in person, someone forgot to lock down presenter rights, and people kept drawing on the slides.

sbov• 14 years ago

Heh, onetime I had to get on a conference call when the blue angels were in town. "No, I don't live in a war zone, sorry about the noise."

pagekalisedown• 14 years ago

Ditto for Tuesdays at noon.

someone13• 14 years ago

Hah! I've been on a conference call while in a building under an airport's departure corridor. If you're trying to talk, it sounds kinda like this:

"So, about that system rrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH and you think so?" (excuse the bad jet noises)

That was a fun hour or so - especially since, even muting the mic when you're not talking, when planes are taking off every 60 seconds, you're bound to get some background noise...

joshwa2• 14 years ago

I've been dialing into conference calls all week from China, where it's still Lunar New Year. This means fireworks and firecrackers, from 8am til midnight. Sounds just like shells and machine guns.

"No, I don't live in a war zone, it's just Chinese New Year."

qntm• 14 years ago

I guess nobody in your entire organisation knows to mute their microphone until they're talking?

scott_s2• 14 years ago

We have a weekly seminar where many people call in. Without fail, every week, people must be reminded to mute their phone if they're not currently speaking.

arnoldwh• 14 years ago

Spot on. My favorite moments are when the person joining an in person meeting via conference call tells everybody that they can't hear. Usually, everyone just looks around awkwardly and somehow silently agrees to ignore that person.

vvnraman• 14 years ago

Good compilation. You have captured almost every scenario I used to go through a while back !!

gabaix• 14 years ago

LMAO. You can add: - Joe asks a question without naming someone - 10 sec. silence - then Judith says: "was the question for me?"

illumin8• 14 years ago

Or the inevitable - "Joe, you there?" 10 seconds of silence - "Sorry, I was on mute."

golgo13• 14 years ago

During our first Livemeetings, I would draw pictures all over the slides. Little did I know, what I saw drawing was visible to everybody! Luckily, no one knew who was creating the drawings. Good times.

cdh• 14 years ago

I've got bad news for you. If you hover your mouse over the drawings, it totally shows who did it.

tonakai• 14 years ago

sometimes during a call a music starts to play pretty loud from one side of the call, which renders the conference useless. I still wonder how that happens.

trout2• 14 years ago

That's the old 'someone forgot to mute the call before accepting another call' trick. That's music on hold.

Aaronontheweb• 14 years ago

Don't forget the person who takes a call on another line and forgets to mute.

gaius• 14 years ago

I never understood why people think it's acceptable to join a work call with kids screaming in the background. These are the same people who smugly ruin other people's flights and restaurant meals. You bred; congratulations. But you really, really shouldn't have.

ams6110• 14 years ago

The narrative of the webcast/screenshare and conference call difficulties describes virtually every such event I've been involved in. The 15 minutes wasted getting everyone online, the ad-hoc troubleshooting for people who can't seem to get signed in, or cant see the screen, or cant share their screen, etc. Are there any screen sharing technologies for quick ad-hoc sessions like this that JUST WORK?

sarcasmatron• 14 years ago

Collective problem solving over group voice communications is a universal skill. Our dev team got really good at it when we all started playing Counterstrike together. MMORPG raiding would be a good place to learn this as well.

If nothing else, they'd be guaranteed to learn proper etiquette by learning what not to do.

mkramlich• 14 years ago

He nailed it. I've experienced situations like that many times in my career. I'm now trying to live a life where I minimize my exposure to such Dilbertesque phenomena. Life's too short to piss it away on stupid people and inefficient processes.

Shengster3• 14 years ago

I had something similar happen to me earlier in the week. The conversation went something like this:

Boss: Hey, we've got an urgent production issue that needs to be looked at. I'm getting some heat on this one and I need someone to diagnose it to see if it's a blocker for our release.

Me: Would you be able to ask X and Y to investigate? It seems they are on the support rotation for production issues. It'll take me at least an hour to clean up what I'm doing and switch over to run the old production instance locally.

Boss: It's urgent, I think you need to drop whatever you're doing and look at this.

Me: OK, sure.

(50 minutes later, as I'm almost done building the old production instance)

...

X and Y come back from a meeting.

Boss: I'll have X and Y look at this, you can go back to working on your stories for this sprint.

Me: !@#?$

joelhaasnoot• 14 years ago

One of the advantages of doing eXtreme Programming with lots of pair programming is that we eventually setup machines to be assigned to certain branches. Costs more computers, but is more productive. The best thing ofcourse is to reduce that buildtime, but not a whole lot you can do there.

iy56• 14 years ago

Use a VM

Shengster3• 14 years ago

Not enough CPU and Memory to do so. Our app is huge.

baconner• 14 years ago

Funny... I assumed the punchline was going to be about the hours it takes a developer to get back into high productivity mode after interruption.

Sure, bosses and customers frequently underestimate the amount of time these sort of calls take and an intermediary (support) ought to take a stab at pulling a clear issue out first, but they're not always wasted time. There's a lot of value in getting devs and customers talking directly. It just needs to be (and can be) planned in a way that avoids breaking up the developer productivity curve unnecessarily.

tux19682• 14 years ago

The title reminded me of the old line about why programmers often confuse Halloween and Christmas... because Oct 31 = Dec 25.

golden_apples• 14 years ago

  Reference Error: Dec 25 is not defined

tux19682• 14 years ago

thanks everyone for piling on the downvotes... lol

jgarmon• 14 years ago

This true for non-coder creatives, too. I can't count the number of times I've been asked to "look at a design" or "go over some copy" because three other employees had some feedback in some meting I wasn't a part of, but no one can remember exactly was "off" with the deliverable. We then have to do the SKype/email round robin until everyone has given their comments again.

This gets even worse when we, the creatives, get feedback about functional changes.

"When I click the checkout button, it goes to the shopping cart."

"Uh...yeah."

"Could you have an upsell page pop up between the two."

"I can write the copy and spec the creative and functional design, but I can't change the button functionality. You'll have to get that prioritized in the next sprint."

"We don't want to bother engineering. We need to get this done quickly."

"It's a functional change. We have to involve engineering."

"So you can't write the page."

"I can write the page. I can spec the page. I can't build or deploy the page."

"That's disappointing."

"You have no idea."

ja2ke• 14 years ago

I only have meetings like that when working somewhere which has a discrete marketing department.

patrickyeon2• 14 years ago

Hmmm, lots of "yeah, I hate it when that happens" comments. Does anybody have ideas on how to fight this? Does anybody keep track like edw did, and then use it to defend themselves for the next "just ten minutes" task? Successfully?

I haven't been able to make a point about how it's not "just ten minutes" without coming off as rude/unhelpful/lazy. I've tried to explain the cost of context-switching, or push it off until I'm not being interrupted, or at least have other people do pre-requisite work first (filing a bug would've fast-forwarded to somewhere between 12:14 and 12:38 here).

In my dream world, a manager respects (or fears) you enough that you can say "you sit right here with me through this whole ordeal, and every minute of mine we waste, you owe me after 5 o'clock" and pull it off. Out here in the real world?

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

I work for a small enough company, where my immediate supervisor commits code with the rest of us, and therefore understands these issues.

hluska2• 14 years ago

Sorry to say this, but I think that the 'just ten minutes' task is a symptom of a much deeper corporate problem.

For example, consider the boss in this story. Why does he/she think a task like this will only take 10 minutes? Is he a developer? Does he keep track of what is going on in other departments? Does he understand how a (seemingly simple) bug like this fits in the context of the whole project?

Or, here's another question. Why is a developer sitting on that particular conference call? Doesn't the company have a QA department, or an internal support department that documents the issue and provides steps to replicate?

Forgive me if I come across as being somewhat dismissive, but when I hear stories like this, I see signs of a very sick company that needs life support.

patrickyeon2• 14 years ago

There is definitely a corporate problem (or many) here. At least the manager deciding that "this needs to be looked into right now" above edw's opinion, and the idea that the whole conf call + webconf dance was a better move than filing a ticket.

> Why is a developer sitting on that particular conference call? Doesn't the company have a QA department, or an internal support department that documents the issue and provides steps to replicate?

Exactly. How should one fight that these steps be taken, when your manager is trying to skip them? The thought process that I expect led to this situation were similar to "I could file a ticket, which will take me 5 minutes, or if I just show it to someone, it'll only take me 3 [not voiced: if nothing goes wrong.] That's working smarter!" Similarily, how do you convey to people the true cost of asking for something like this, instead of them treating everybody else's time and effort as externalities.

Yes, there are signs of a sick culture. Culture is fluid though, so how does one push it back towards health? Preferrably without getting classed as difficult/rude/not-a-team-player and then having any argument you bring ignored.

sskates• 14 years ago

You might be shocked to hear this but the vast majority of businesses in the real world have such huge process issues that you'd diagnose most of the economy as full of "very sick companies that need life support".

Kadrith• 14 years ago

I'm often on the other end of this; assigning "10 minute" tasks to people. What I try to do is have a common place where I will put these with the expectation that it is checked at least once per day; normally OneNote. I don't expect all of the tasks to be done each day, but I also don't want them sent into a black hole. I leave it up to the team to figure out when they can accomplish the tasks based upon when I need the work done or to provide me with feedback on feasibility.

If I have an urgent item that has to be done RIGHT NOW there may be an exception but in four years of being in this job I've only had a few of those. Those types of events are usually patient safety events where a patient's life is literally on the line and some piece of technology is acting up.

rickmb5• 14 years ago

It starts by saying "no".

The first few times this may be followed by an explanation. But if you don't say no, if you don't show that you are a serious professional who takes responsibility for his work, everything else will sound like whining.

Yes, there a lots of clueless non-technical managers out there, but most of them are neither complete douchebags, nor are they too thick to understand the problem.

Most of them will listen if you show them you're serious and not just trying to weasel your way out of something. If only because it is in their interests to take you seriously.

petervandijck• 14 years ago

I'm starting to think, almost everything good starts by saying "no".

Chris_Newton• 14 years ago

I think there are four recurring mistakes that cause these comical situations. Two are technical and two are social.

The first technical mistake is using communications tools with built-in latency: e-mail instead of IM/IRC, conference call that everyone must dial into at a specific time instead of starting with at least two people on a call and calling others to join in real time. E-mail and scheduled dial-in conference calls must be just about the least efficient methods of professional communication ever invented.

The other technical mistake is not having software for remote communications, particularly desktop sharing/presentations, that is readily available at the click of a mouse and familiar enough for all participants to set it up in moments. (A related mistake is using a dial-in conference service that isn't actually reliable. If you can't find one that works as it's supposed to -- and a lot of them don't, IME -- then you can at least ask someone to spend a bit of time and money installing an in-house solution if you need this facility often.)

The first social mistake is allowing one person's lack of preparation to waste time for everyone in the group. There is no excuse for coming to multiple people and asking them to set up a call to discuss a bug when you don't know the bug number, nor for them not to have the details in front of them when joining the call. It's basic good practice for any meeting that everyone know in advance who will be attending, why, and what the goals of the meeting are, that someone lead the meeting efficiently, and that the results be circulated promptly afterwards. If you get to the scale where you have to involve multiple people at the same time, failing to do these things will almost inevitably waste time, and again it will often be the whole group's time while one individual sorts out something they should have done earlier.

The second social mistake is being accepting of people who are late when a large meeting has been scheduled. Whenever possible, the meeting should start precisely on-time, and should not deviate from the published agenda to bring latecomers up to speed. If they miss out, it's their job to catch up afterwards, not the entire group's job to spin its wheels while someone recaps. If key people are consistently late and wasting others' time in this way, that is a serious management issue and someone needs to address why it is happening. Otherwise, you get to having a dozen people on the call, and if one key person is 10 minutes late because they were "just finishing an e-mail" then you've found another way to turn 10 minutes into two hours...

nandemo2• 14 years ago

If it was 10 minutes to investigate and fix an urgent production bug, it would be OK. But he was asked time to join a teleconference in order to listen to a bug report! You can say "no" right there. A bug should be reported via a bug tracking system, maybe email for redundancy. There's no justification whatsoever to jump into a teleconference for a non-critical bug. Besides they got a QA department, so surely they have someone else (more technical than the bug reporter) who could look at it first to determine if it was really a bug, etc.

> "you sit right here with me through this whole ordeal, and every minute of mine we waste, you owe me after 5 o'clock"

That's not very savvy, to say the least. You sell your time to the company. The manager is not wasting your time, they're wasting the company's time or the "team's time" if you prefer. So you have to let him know when they're making decisions against their own best interest: "look, we have tasks A, B, and C, currently A is high priority, if you wish me to do task D, I'll be happy to do it, but it will delay A for n hours. And which of B or C should we re-schedule? I think it's C because blablah".

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

The thing is, it really did take about 10 minutes, but they weren't consecutive. Yeah, it's a bit of a smartass comment, but also true.

Some people really can be as productive (or close to it) doing 6 10 minute tasks in an hour, switching every few minutes between those 6. To them, they still just spent 10 minutes on each task, and they're oblivious to the fact that not everyone's work can be sliced around like that with the same degree of quality that theirs can.

eCa2• 14 years ago

Doing (starting and finishing) six discreet tasks in an hour is not too difficult. Obviously those tasks are not very taxing.

What is hard if you have one four hour task, and one task that requires your attention every fifteenth minute. It completely ruins the four hour task.

Drbble• 14 years ago

The hardest part is making sure no one finds out about all them, and that information doesn't leak between those discreet tasks. Indiscretions are killer.

csomar• 14 years ago

If this is happening frequently, then you need a support stuff. The support stuff will spend those 3 hours to get the actually problem and explain it to you in 10 minutes at the end of the day.

If you want to focus, and your work is programming then you should delegate support to someone else. Probably a knowledgeable person about the software and some programming/technical skills to solve trivial problems.

yonasb• 14 years ago

Solution: use join.me or Print Screen + email and description

m_myers• 14 years ago

In Windows 7, you can use the Problem Steps Recorder to handle screenshots and descriptions for you: Start -> Run -> psr.exe.

(Stolen from the Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/p9mxq/dear_boss...)

darwindeeds• 14 years ago

Ed really wasn't working but just reading HN. He is one of those guys who is always busy but doesnt do anything. The problem is Ed's boss thinks that he is actually good. The problem is not just with Ed though, his boss should have had Sue on call before get Ed on. Sue is lazy too. This is a company that is not getting anywhere. :)

dubajj• 14 years ago

In the time he spent reading HN, you could instead write an automated test hook to make sure this problem never happens ever again.

Ed is a bad employee not because he is wasting time, but because he is publicly cultivating a culture of blaming time sink on others.

bitops3• 14 years ago

I think it's a disgrace that your comment is near the bottom of this thread. Ed's attitude sucks and he will cost the company money. The people down voting you don't seem to care much for having a work ethic.

nirvana3• 14 years ago

I think this illustrates a fundamental problem with the people being hired to manage programmers. I worked for a boss like this at Amazon. His degree wasn't even in business, but in criminal justice-- he was trained to be a prison guard and acted like it. His boss was even worse- I swear she must have been an ex-DMV employee, all attitude, no knowledge. (I forget her area of study but it had nothing to do with management, business or computer science.)

A previous boss was-- and I am not kidding here at all-- a grade school teacher. He was in charge of the programmers. Knew nothing about programming but since the company was making educational software, obviously an gradeshool teacher should be running the department, right? The person running the art department was also a grade school teacher. They all had mastered that patronizing "settle down children" tone, and used it constantly. When we'd tell them that what they were asking wasn't practical or would take extra time, they'd be patronizing like we were trying to lie about having spilled milk. It is hilarious in retrospect.

Why does senior management at these companies think that programmers should be managed by people who know nothing about programming?

herge• 14 years ago

The term I recently discoved for these people is Non-Technical Middle Managers.

gte910h3• 14 years ago

I've worked with tons of non-technical middle managers. The real trick is to not budge on estimation math.

P=Programmger M=Manager

Bad one: P.Here is the estimate. M.I want it done faster. P.Okay cut things. M.No. P.Well, it will still be done according to the estimate, as that's math. We have to change what we're doing to shorten the estimate, we can't just arbitrarily shorten it. M. I expect it done in 70% of the time on the estimate. All Done. Or Else.

Okay one: P. Here is the estimate. M. I want it done faster. P.Okay cut things. M.Take out so and so and do so and so less well.

Good one: P.Here is the estimate. M.What are things we can do to shorten this? P. Okay, we can de-risk items 1, 2 and 17 by limiting the requirements to X, and we can save a ton of time if we drop the requirement we can display right to left languages as well. M. Let me run the first thing by the client. M. The second won't fly, but even 10% is good.

I've worked with some EXCELLENT ones as well as some so so and some poor ones. The real trick is: Remember, their boss probably ALSO thinks they're not that good if they pull crap on their reports. Push back, and do well because of it.

nostrademons2• 14 years ago

Why don't you vote with your feet then and work for a company where your boss a.) knows how to write software and b.) knows how to manage software engineers. If a suitable company doesn't exist, why not start one? (Speaking to bystanders here, I know that your about page shows you're working on something cool.)

When I look at my management chain at Google, it's engineers all the way up. My manager was a consultant for 20 years working on DARPA AI projects. My director wrote much of Google's critical early search infrastructure. My VP invented Google's ranking algorithm. My SVP used to work on chip design at Digital's Western Research Lab. My CEO invented PageRank.

Things don't change unless people make them change. Where you see dysfunctional management, I see clueless lumbering behemoths that are tasty prey for a startup.

radog• 14 years ago

But this isn't even true of many groups at Google, where people are managed by young (admittedly generally very smart) hotshot product managers without an engineering background.

bootload• 14 years ago

"... Why don't you vote with your feet then and work for a company where your boss a.) knows how to write software and b.) knows how to manage software engineers. If a suitable company doesn't exist, why not start one? ..."

To me that's the difference between "developer, technologist, engineer" & "entrepreneur". The former will simply be happy if the conditions are suitable. The later wants to build their own company to create the conditions they want. In effect be their own boss.

reinhardt• 14 years ago

I am curious, is this a common and similarly frustrating experience for non-programmers? Are managers of, say, car technicians or accountants just as clueless about their subordinates?

sutterbomb• 14 years ago

May be worse for programmers, but it all comes down to a lack of ground-level details. From 5,000 feet you can't see how thorny the bush is.

jrwoodruff• 14 years ago

In my experience no, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were better managers.

The specific problem with programming is it's pretty much invisible - the end result, when well done, hides the enormous levels of complexity it takes to create it. It's just 'another website' or whatever.

That's compounded by the problem that, in the U.S. at least, managers seem to think their job is having influence/power over people, and telling them/making do things. In fact, management is supposed to be a support role. Managers should be creating an environment that enable their employees to do their job as best as possible.

In my experience -many- managers exist to please the person above them, and think very little (or, at best, simply are unable to see) how their actions effect their employees happiness and productivity.

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

Having worked in the service side of a BMW dealership, the service manager there was a tech who got promoted into the position. He was the go-to guy whenever there was a hard technical problem to solve. Some companies Do It Right, others don't.

analyst74• 14 years ago

A friend of mine is a pipeline engineer, and he said all their middle management (his boss, his boss's boss, and possibly higher up) are mostly promoted from engineers.

Their team lead is generally the most experienced/capable person on the team.

rickmb5• 14 years ago

How do you think this is ever going to change if programmers, some of the most sought after professionals in this economy, keep taking orders from these people?

For a team with mature, responsible and professional developers, it shouldn't be such a big deal to have a non-technical manager anyway. Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around. A good manager, technical background or not, will be glad to get out of the way of a good team.

I myself am a manager with a technical background. I consider myself no more than mediocre as a manager. There are a lot of non-technical managers out there who could probably do a way better job managing , but they would have to be told by the programmers what they need from them.

But most programmers don't speak up. Most programmers don't say no. Most programmers don't explain why interruptions are so costly, let alone outright refuse to let that ruin their work. Most programmers have never read pg's essay about maker time and manager time.

A professional chef will walk out if his boss told him to burn every steak to a crisp, but most programmers will grumble a bit, get on with it and then (but only if they really care) bitch about it online. This despite the fact that chefs have way more to lose given the job market.

With most programmers being so unprofessional, assigning a grade school teacher doesn't even sound like such a far fetched idea...

It's not exclusively a senior management problem. Senior management doesn't know there is a problem unless they happen to have a technical background themselves, which is an unrealistic expectation, given that software is everywhere these days.

It is first and foremost our problem. We're the ones that know what is wrong and how to fix it. We are the professionals this business relies on.

Only assigning managers with a technical background isn't going to work anyway, because there are not enough of them to go round.

As a programmer, you have to be a bit of masochist to put the peter principle to the test on yourself while your technical knowledge is still relevant, and people are willing to pay you good money just to code.

nirvana3• 14 years ago

"With most programmers being so unprofessional, assigning a grade school teacher doesn't even sound like such a far fetched idea..."

Wow!

FWIW, I am one who is genetically incapable of keeping his mouth shut. If something's stupid or sucks, I'll say so. If people disagree with me and have arguments to back up their disagreements I'll listen. I have zero tolerance for responses along the lines of "because I said so, just do it."

In my experience, a lot of programmers are like this as well.

There came a time when the CEO of the company where gradeschool teachers were the management was replaced... by someone who also knew nothing about development. She recognized all the problems with the product (which was being mismanaged) and I told her that the problem was management, how we'd tried to have reasonable practices, including repeated requests for a plan that we could stick to, and that the grade school teachers were in over their head. I recommend that they be put into a position to have input on the educational aspects of the product, but that engineering should be run by someone who understood engineering. She told me that there would be no management changes, and she wanted me-- given that I was the most senior engineer-- to give her a plan for fixing things. (Seemingly oblivious to the fact that I'd just given her the solution.)

I told her I'd been working on a plan and that I'd give it to her in 30 minutes. Went back to my office, wrote a resignation letter, named the fact that management made product progress impossible as the reason, and handed it to her. She said "That was fast" and I said, it's not what you're expecting, and walked out of the office, never to return. (I had been on the bubble already, and would have resigned earlier if the events that led to her becoming the new CEO hadn't occurred.)

I cannot think of anything more compelling than explaining why things were broken, making suggestions for how to fix it, those being rejected out of hand, and then emphasizing the point with a resignation. I was committed enough that I gave up my job, without a replacement lined up. I don't know what more could have possibly underlined the seriousness of my position to her.

Do you think she learned anything by this? No management changes were made, but apparently I did have some impact: The gradeschool teachers got even more hysterical and neurotic after I left, starting to accuse employees of paranoid conspiracies, etc. More and more people started resigning. The company failed not long after this.

It is my considered impression that most people who are clueless are not interested in thinking about things-- when something unusual happens, like my resignation-- they just assume that its a reflection on me, rather than the situation. Everyone working on the product knew the problem, there wasn't debate among us, but management was too ignorant to even understand that the problem was management.

The grade school teachers saw everything thru that lens-- they thought "their kids" were screwing around or wasting time, or wanting to do thing their own way rather than the way they needed to be done, and so they believed it was just irresponsibility that was causing the product problems. Meanwhile we were getting whiplash as they changed their opinions and positions and demands for what the product would do on a weekly basis.

One thing I've noticed in bad managers that is pretty consistent-- they tend to change their mind about what the product should do, and then think that their subordinates are slacking when the product doesn't do the new thing. Even thought they may have wasted 6 months under a prior plan, they don't account for that-- all those six months are credited towards the new plan, and why wasn't it done already if you had 6 months?

In the case of the grade school teachers, this product was a magical wonderland where anything they could dream up could be created-- and any time their thoughts changed the product could change without any cost at all, cause to them it was totally plastic.

So anytime someone said that these changes would take time and have impact on other things, they thought the person was just being lazy and didn't want to make the changes.

I remember once, there was a rumor that a VC firm associated with Bill Gates might be investing, and so my boss came in and told me we had to replace all of our linux based infrastructure (file server, email server, web server, etc) with Windows. "If bill gate finds out we're using linux we won't get funded!" I told him it was silly as things were working fine... so he brought in a "windows consultant" who told us we needed to buy 4 new top of the line servers to replace our one spare developer PC that was doing all the work currently, cause "You can't run a web server and and FTP server on the same machine!" Naturally the grade school teacher believed his over priced consultant- who was telling him what he wanted to hear- over his engineer.

How was he to know any different? He's a grade school teacher. (He now has a significant position at Microsoft, which I think is hilarious....)

yason2• 14 years ago

* Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around.*

Exactly. That's what good management does: insulate the programmers from as much nonsense that is possible. A good manager has some grasp of the field so that he can block at least the most outrageous feature requests from the devs or at least delay asking about them until a weekly meeting or something. If the devs have problem, the manager will drive the issues through the cogs and clogs of the organization and bureaucracy instead of using valuable developer time to track those issues.

An anecdote: I have had travelling arranged by a competent office manager and a company-wide travel reservation and approval system. Guess which saved so much time from everyone, sending an email to the office manager "I need to fly to X next Tuesday, my boss on Cc: with this" and afterwards dropping a stack of receipts back to her for filing reimbursements, or a dozen people trying to figure out what's the best way through the travel system without sacrificing too much work time on that and still ending up scanning individual receipts for uploading to the system.

jrockway• 14 years ago

Why does senior management at these companies think that programmers should be managed by people who know nothing about programming?

Because most programmers don't want to manage. The few who do and are good at it are out of most companies' price range. Remember, as Random Educational Software Shop, you're competing in the same market as Google and Facebook. 99% of the good developers are going to go there instead, because they get more money and better work. You can't just wish people will work for you; you have to actively recruit them and make it worth their while.

ameyamk• 14 years ago

You seem to have awesome history of bosses!

dkarl2• 14 years ago

Why does senior management at these companies think that programmers should be managed by people who know nothing about programming?

A good manager can be good without knowing about programming. Right now I'm on a mixed team that is managed by a guy who has no background in programming. He trusts his people and delegates a lot of borderline managerial tasks, such as prioritizing technical work and evaluating the success of projects, to senior programmers. Apparently it's a viable way to manage programmers, because it works well for us. The manager lets technical folks make the technical decisions and backs his tech leads in cases of disagreement. It would all fall apart if he stopped trusting the judgment of his technical leads, but when management doesn't trust the judgment of their senior people, the situation is probably FUBAR anyway. Ditto if the senior technical folks behave unprofessionally -- it's a FUBAR situation until they act like adults or you get rid of them.

Domain knowledge can help a constructive manager become a more valuable asset for his team, but any competent manager can at least learn to get out of his team's way and provide support in small ways. If a manager is an obstruction to getting work done, then he's a bad manager, and domain understanding won't turn him around. It might even make him more effective at being an obstruction.

johnx123-up2• 14 years ago

Are you indicating Jeff Bezos?

codeonfire3• 14 years ago

You're absolutely right and I know exactly what you are talking about. There is a crisis in software management and the people who run corporations don't and won't understand it. The problem is that lots of non-engineers want big money and are good enough bullshitters to get in over their heads. You get one in at a high level and of course someone with little to no experience is going to distrust the engineers who spent decades in universities and companies learning the field. Who are they going to hire for middle management, super knowledgeable trained engineering managers or other non-engineers who share their distrust? Their distrust is warranted as they are unqualified.

The problem is only compounded by the fact that everyone can have a computer while not everyone can design and assemble a nuclear reactor or highway bridge. Therefore, people easily overestimate their understanding and abilities in being a dev manager. Add to this the fact that software is paying much better than many other fields including sciences, academia, and engineering and everyone wants in.

The fallout is hellish work environments as programmers have to contend with these people (who bring over their outdated interpretation of the management role from their old careers), and a disengaged workforce looking for the exit doors. Long term this will only drive software costs up.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

This has a lot to do with the claim that some programmers are 10x more productive than other programmers.

If this happens to you more than once a month, you're not in the 10x club. If you want to be in the 10x club you need to avoid this at all cost. Otherwise you're just another muggle chafing at the bit.

sukuriant3• 14 years ago

If circumstances beyond your control happen more than once a month, you're not in the 10x club?

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

Ok, I exaggerated.

But you've got to have dedication if you truly want to "Have Fun At Work"

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

I think the message is to change your environment such that you're not getting this sort of interruption.

I interviewed, three times (and turned down, three times) with a firm that apparently really wanted me. Why?

1: They were a very small vendor working for a very large client. The client is a household (swear) word, and behaves in a gratuitously overbearing manner to its customers and other vendors.

2: Everyone I spoke with admitted that this relationship lead to many, many last-minute changes in spec requiring much overtime and pain to make things just so. All while praying that things wouldn't change yet again at the next last minute.

I said "thanks, but no".

rickmb5• 14 years ago

Dear programmer: If the Boss asks you something, it's okay to say "no".

Since your boss is apparently unaware of the problem, who's going to solve it if you don't speak up? There are no magic hacker fairies on HN that are going to do that for you.

barefoot• 14 years ago

Be careful about how you phrase "no". Sometimes an explanation of what's involved, previous times on similar tasks, and a question ("sure, would you like me to go ahead and start now?" after explaining that it will likely take two hours instead of two minutes) goes a lot further.

tomflack• 14 years ago

I agree with you and the parent. It's a conversation you need to have at least once. Explain your workflow, getting in the zone, etc. Explain why there is a ticketing system. Explain the disruption to the productive day that interruptions like this bring.

It totally sucks that you can't just be a semi-independent craftsman who works on what comes their way in a nice orderly queue, but that's the reality of today's workforce. If the interruptions keep happening time and time again after having this conversation and following up on it, then at least you know where you stand in this company.

wisty• 14 years ago

The problem is, you suddenly have an onus to be polite about it.

"I have a concern that this may not be feasible".

"No, you just have to try harder!"

"Sorry, I wasn't very clear: This is flat out impossible".

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, because google tried, and couldn't do it. You see, it's actually impossible to get the (technical mumbo jumbo) so it will take literally years to run a single query."

And this isn't a typical case. The most likely case is you suspect that the boss is leading everyone into the valley of death, but can't prove it. Do you confront them yourself, try to sound out other colleagues (who may have other concerns, since it's not their problem), or just warn them that there's likely to be problems, and gradually manage their expectations?

In an ideal world, bosses are good at both ferreting out concerns fro indirect hints ("I'm a bit worried that"), and dealing with direct statements ("It's impossible, you git!"). In reality, they are often just wage slaves who kiss up and kick down, and don't really care if the project flops as long as someone else is to blame.

johnx123-up2• 14 years ago

If the Boss isn't clueless when you say "no", you may be get fired. My friend has similar experiences.

gte910h3• 14 years ago

You mean "if he is clueless" perhaps?

Managing experts in a field means using their expertise. I'd call not using that clueless, so you'll usually only get fired by the clueless.

aidenn0• 14 years ago

We should thank this boss for subsidizing all of edw519's comments on HN

strictfp• 14 years ago

Dear programmer, when your boss says 'can you spare 10 minutes for me' he probably means 'can you help me take care of this exceptional situation'. The bug was probably severe and the boss wanted a dev to confirm that it was live before taking it to the steering commitee. The only slight wtf is how the boss worded that request. But taking something to the steering committe is a pretty big deal, so I understand that he would want to confirm it!

lesterbuck• 14 years ago

I guess I am hopelessly naive, but why is a ticket accepted without a short screencast of the issue? There are a number of free/cheap screen capture programs these days. There was no need for Ed's involvement (or his manager's involvement) until the problem had been captured. If submitting a ticket ends up meaning the developer sits there live as the user reproduces the problem (again), then the support department has much bigger scalability issues.

cobralibre• 14 years ago

But that, too, would be overkill. From TFA, here is the issue:

OK, if I go into the main menu, click "Operations", then click "Sales", then click "History" it takes me to the Sales History Menu. See?... Then I click on Sales History Display by Part. I enter "R27-93" and the main screen pops up. Then I click on Invoices, I hit F5, then F3, then F7, and the Invoice Part Number changes to "GT548". This should never happen. What gives?

What makes the article so mordantly funny is that it takes hours to get to this. Somebody could have typed out a description of the problem in minutes.

Hominem• 14 years ago

This is my life. All day. Every day.

Along with status checks every 15 minutes.

I love it though, every problem is an adventure. I couldn't be one of those dig in for a month and code developers.

rauar• 14 years ago

now he should know why he's the boss :p

Flemlord• 14 years ago

I feel sorry for the boss. Ed sounds disgruntled and/or lazy -- waiting for somebody to call you back, respond to email, or join a meeting is not an excuse to surf all day.

bitops3• 14 years ago

Agree. The comments getting the up votes seem to think that techs should just sit around while the dumb users get their act together. Ed is as much a part of that team as everyone else.

yason2• 14 years ago

Then what could he do but wait? Stare mindlessly to the screen, waiting for the flow to kick back in just to be interrupted again by another email or ring? To preserve your mental health, you need to do something sensible while waiting for your stack of work to clear ahead. Reading HN is probably one of the best and productive activities.

tkellogg• 14 years ago

it reminds me of waiting for gogot

trout2• 14 years ago

After doing this a few times a day for years the correct answer would be, "alright get them on the meeting recreating the problem and invite me when they're ready. "

On average it takes 15-30 to get to someone else's screen to a productive point.

erdevs• 14 years ago

This is gross.

Not the fact that the conference call was a mess of technical difficulties, or that Ed's boss interrupted his workflow.

That Ed sat back. That the company's culture would even tolerate anything near this level of lackadaisical disengagement.

If you're a Hacker, you don't say things like "that's not what I'm paid to do." You don't even think things like that.

Your job is to help make your company, and those around you, successful.

If you're not in a company with a mission you believe in, where you are excited to help achieve the goals the whole team is working toward... then freaking leave. Can you not find a job programming at a company that you do believe in? Then you're not a Hacker. You should probably stop reading Hacker News.

The failure in management here isn't interrupting Ed. It's allowing such a lazy, selfish culture to exist in the first place. It's not inspiring Ed enough that he actually wants to help his co-workers be more efficient, because he realizes they are valuable components of the engine that is trying to accomplish a shared mission and set of goals too. It's not firing Ed's ass any of the number of occasions where he has doubtless sat back and watched teammates make mistakes without even trying to help.

This is really, really gross.

sukuriant3• 14 years ago

I think you're being a bit too hard on Ed.

A lot of things need to be answered.

How many times has this happened that he's had to deal with? How many times has he tried to explain to his boss that things take a lot of time? How many times has he tried to help and only confused them more? How many times has he been reprimanded by his boss for trying to help with these tasks?

Also, how is Ed lazy? The chance of needing to speak up at a given moment is so high he couldn't adequately do another task, especially a programming one, or any task that requires a high amount of focus.

gaelen224• 14 years ago

You are right. It is a little too harsh toward Ed.

I think the general point is correct, though. The management failure here is much deeper. The culture apparently tolerates interruption of important work. Firedrills over relatively trivial problems. Leaning back and watching teammates fumble. And just generally not solving problems in efficient ways, looking for and resolving root causes.

It is clear that Ed is not happy or fired up. The company sounds lame. I'm sure this is not the first time something like this has happened. Otherwise, why complain about it? And rather than leaning back and watch the slow motion car wreck over and over, I think erdevs is right... this is pretty lazy and lame. The company sounds lame too. Seems like the Hacker Way would have Ed either leaving such a lame place, or intervening at this place to try to help level the company up as best he can.

chaostheory• 14 years ago

Ed, I hate to ask this question, but given all the posts that I've read from you on the subject; why do you still work for that company? Am I wrong to assume that most of your work related posts center on the same company?

One reason that I bring it up is that I've been there, and I've moved on to greener pastures. Where I've been still isn't perfect, but it's way better than the distant past. Your posts bring up a lot of bad memories for me. I could barely even make it past a year in that situation.

devs1010• 14 years ago

This brings up nightmares from when I worked remotely for a startup (they had no in-person office, by the way) and the boss was obsessed with WebEx, I had issues with it working on Ubuntu, also, so I would have to boot up a VM each time to use it. It got to the point where I told him every WebEx we do is a minimum of 1 hour of time wasted for me so lets make sure we really need to do a WebEx before we go down that path.

mathattack• 14 years ago

It's amazing how many folks at a software firm struggle to make a videoconference call, let alone a 3 way call. :-) Then again, in a prior life as a telecom consultant, I couldn't get 3 way calling to work on a landline.

malandrew• 14 years ago

Sadly, 3 hours is just the lower limit. The upper limit can be the whole day. 3 hours is how much time is wasted in the call. Depending how complex the task you were working on before the interruption, it can take up to the rest of the day just to re-immerse yourself in the problem you were solving before being interrupted.

readme• 14 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

scotty79• 14 years ago

I think the problem is that people are allowed to open their physical mouths when they are in the presence of the developers.

I worked in one company that was managed nearly perfectly. If someone came to the developer to tell him something, he wasn't met with "hello". He was met with "Write a ticket!". Even though all employees occupied almost undivided space of less than 50 sq meters.

Ticket system was only legal means of communication. Tickets had to be written well because you had no other way to reach the developer with your message. From time to time developer came to the ticket issuer to verify some details but he might as well just ask further details in ticket comments.

There was one half an hour meeting per week that was attended by product manager that knew what she wants and two or three programmers working on the interconnected parts of the same thing. Product manager was available for instant contact for the developers at any time and had enough decision power to respond instantly.

Developer could talk to the other developer when he had an issue or was interested in what the other developer was doing and if he has any issues. These "meetings" where usually announced via skype or happening at natural time when target developer was already out of zone because he was just getting back from toilet of with fresh cup of tee.

There were of course "sky is falling" events that needed to be responded to urgently. There were communicated to developers by product manager via skype or in person but they were rare and serious enough so the developers wanted to deal with them in the first place to get "I just saved the day" feeling.

Ticket system was the communication hub, wiki and google docs were the knowledge hub. Skype was when you have to ask someone about something but you don't want to make noise or interrupt them. And mouths were for drinking tee (or coffee) and swapping short remarks with the developer that is at the moment looking at the same physical screen as you do.

And no slacking off because you monitor is visible to everybody.

I think that the issue described by the blog post author would be resolved by "boss" telling Sue to describe step by step how to reproduce the issue or record a movie of her reproducing the issue and create a ticket for the developer with that description or the link to that movie. Boss could further (if it's really important) ask the developer politely at 30 minutes Monday meeting if he could take a look at this issue (after checking of course before the meeting if developer didn't do that yet).

If you allow for other thing of communicating business issues (like email, skype, meat flapping) then the ticket system becomes cargo cult device that no one really pays attention to.

SonicSoul• 14 years ago

this hits so close to home. I have a manager who often claims a given task is "really simple" (especially in meetings) and when assigning some of these simple tasks he informs me that they should take 10 minutes. The funny part is to watch him take on some of these 10 minute tasks, and watch him cooped up in his office for 5 hours screaming at various pieces of software (i.e. visual studio or IIS) not behaving in a manner suitable for said 10 minute task. After the 10 minutes (plus 5 hours) of working on it, he'll call me into his office and ask me why his local IIS isn't working and that "it doesn't make any sense"... will spend another half hour troubleshooting all his issues, and 10 minutes after that his fix is ready to enter the release cycle.

dmbaggett• 14 years ago

To me this seems to be about valuing time and personal discipline as much as programmers/creatives vs managers. I know programmers who value their own time as poorly as the manager in this story. One would always find these programmers in the kitchen, posting long manifestos on their blog (they have a blog?!) or HN, etc. -- almost never producing any actual code. And I know managers who work very hard to protect their charges from distraction. Most (maybe all) of the very best programmers and managers I know are incredibly disciplined and value their time extremely highly. The never do what I'm doing right now (post on HN) or wander the halls chatting with people unless there is some specific objective they are trying to accomplish in doing so.

The browsing-HN part of the story really struck me. Back at the dawn of the web, when surfing-while-compiling and surfing-while-on-concall first became possible, I worked with Andy Gavin at Naughty Dog. Andy is an extraordinary programmer, but not just because of experience and smarts; he's also very disciplined. When he's waiting for a build to finish, or engaged in some other "idle" activity, he switches emacs buffers and starts working on something else. He doesn't just browse the web while waiting for something; he works in parallel on multiple problems to make the most efficient use of time. He's never really idle. This is pretty hard to do, and requires great discipline. But it means that Andy automatically gets 10-20% more done in a typical work day than his exact equivalent who is surfing while compiling. And he probably has a lower "switching cost" than most, because he's practiced switching so much he's really good at it.

Likewise, the best developers I worked with at ITA Software would write code and fix bugs during what would otherwise be time-wasting periods: during pointless concalls, on airplanes, etc.

Personally, I am now so busy that I measure disruptions in terms of percentages of my day or week. E.g., taking one hour for lunch means I just consumed somewhere between 1/8th and 1/16th of my productive time for the day. (And since I am now in my 40s, I have to be realistic: it's closer to 1/8th than when I was 20-something.) Ditto for a one-hour concall. And then there's switching cost, time to get focused, etc., so multiply those costs by, say, 1.1 for the transitions.

Once you start measuring time-cost this way, you quickly realize that it's not just the PHBs at your particular megacorp -- it's the entire world that's set up to distract you from getting anything done. The very fact that everyone still wants to talk on the phone when it's 10-100 times less time-efficient than emailing or texting a 150 character message is evidence that most people's social needs outweigh their desire to be genuinely productive. And, to be fair, most people view the kinds of people HN readers laud as "10x programmers" as dysfunctional, miserable, obsessive workaholics.

I don't think you have to have "engineers all the way up" to make a software organization productive. I think you need to have disciplined people who value time very highly all the way up. Engineering fields tend to emphasize discipline, patience, and focus, so good engineers often have these qualities. But some non-engineers do too, and not allowing these people to help run your company is, IMO, a mistake that leads to less creativity and more group-think.

This post just cost me 30 minutes: 1/8th of my possible productive time today. But it's OK, because it's Saturday.

veidr• 14 years ago

I've known people who could do high-output context-switching like that; what they taught me was that context-switching is a skill, and one gets better with practice. (Just like power-napping!)

feralchimp• 14 years ago

How this should have gone:

Boss: we have a problem in production. Can you take a look at it right now?

Ed: What's the ticket number?

Boss: Sue entered it; I'll get it from her.

[Boss gets ticket number; in the meantime Ed does something else productive.]

Ed: Thanks Boss; I'll call Sue if I can't figure this out from the ticket. By when do you need an update?

Boss: I'm concerned that pending changes could hold up a fix for this. If that's the case I'll need clearance from Steering before we can patch it. Let me know if this needs a code change, and what else could be affected.

Ed: Right-o. [taptaptap]

nandemo2• 14 years ago

Exactly. You wrote what I meant to write in my comment, but much more concisely.

(however, it's quite possible Ed has mentioned the problems in the process many times. At some point, people give up and concentrate on doing what they can.)

lnanek• 14 years ago

I've always been able to multi-task pretty well. If one feature/bug requires a long test run, or review by someone else, or an email back and forth I can often switch over to another copy of the code and work on another. This has actually backfired with micromanaging bosses, though. I remember once the whole engineering team at a startup agreed I could fix the file size of an app as I went. So I worked a new file compression into a commit that involved the files anyway. Unfortunately, it looked like it took three days when it actually took a couple 10 minute sessions with a glob command line as it went through the review process, but was interspersed with other work.

Well the manager went nuts against this change. Argued in emails citing problems that had long been fixed in the review thread emails, making up a bunch of incorrect complaints (he couldn't understand the difference between AAC and AAC+ and how they had different device support, and after having it explained to him, started with just vague "it's too much change" bullshit that couldn't be corrected). When I talked to him over IM about it later he admitted the real reason was because he said it took me days to do it and he wasn't going to approve any work on it no matter what. He was always the sort of guy who did the popular thing in big meetings with the employees, then pulled the rug out in private.

jmboling• 14 years ago

So tired of misleading headlines like this that pump up engineer ego... stop feeling better than everybody and work with people as good as you think you are -- or stop complaining.

mrstinton• 14 years ago

Sounds to me like the boss is an idiot. Did they really need to screw around with a web conference just to demonstrate that there was a bug in the sales history display?

He should have had Sue just paste a couple of before/after screenshots into a doc file with a sentence or two of explanation and send it to Ed.

"Here's the sales history for R27-93 (screenshot)... I hit F5, F3, F7 and the part number now incorrectly shows GT548 (screenshot)..."

jeffool• 14 years ago

I worked an overnight shift as a TV news producer, and was told to watch a recording of an earlierweb conference. The entire thing was a recording of the wrong monitor. I tried explaining to my boss that watching this wouldn't help me learn the new software, as if such oversight is required for most heavy computer users, but he insisted I watch it anyway, just so he could tell corporate everyone had seen it.

After he failed to understand that the video contained no video of the software, because corporate could do no wrong, I told him I would watch it. The things one does...

Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours

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